In other stories, the mystery lies in explaining an unusual set of circumstances, usually connected to a criminal plot for instance, in “The Red-Headed League,” Holmes must find out why only a red-headed man should be employed by a mysterious organization to copy out pages from an encyclopedia. The stories make use of tropes used extensively in late Victorian detective fiction and developed in the 20th century, most significantly the threat of the criminal foreigner and the return of a colonial past with criminal consequences (“The Engineer’s Thumb,” “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” “The Five Orange Pips”) and the instability of identity (“A Case of Identity,” “The Man with the Twisted Lip”). By contrast, the Adventures are mostly based in romantic and political intrigues, financial conspiracies, and ingeniously planned robberies only three of the stories (“The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” “The Five Orange Pips,” and “The Speckled Band”) involve a murder investigation.
The short stories are, perhaps deliberately considering the intended family readership of the Strand Magazine, less sensational than the first novellas, which featured corpses in bloodied rooms and macabre deaths by exotic poisons. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes comprised the first 12 stories to be included in the Strand Magazine: “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “A Case of Identity,” “The Red-Headed League,” “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” “The Five Orange Pips,” “The Man With the Twisted Lip,” “The Blue Carbuncle,” “The Speckled Band,” “The Engineer’s Thumb,” “The Noble Bachelor,” “The Beryl Coronet,” and “The Copper Beeches.” The stories mark a departure from the embedded narration form of the longer stories and show modifications in the character of Holmes, from the decadent figure of the novellas to a more ascetic character (for example, as Ian Ousby points out, Holmes’s use of cocaine is greatly reduced). After the novellas A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle employed the shorter form for subsequent stories featuring Sherlock Holmes, not returning to the novel until The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).
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These 12 detective stories were first published as a series in the Strand Magazine, 1891–92, and then as a collection by George Newnes in 1892. Analysis of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes